Our second text. Chandler was an Englishman who ambled us around that violent hell called Los Angeles. Now we plummet deeper into the abyss in the company of a Frenchified American. The walls are thick with freezing slime and splashes of gore; plumes of yellow sulphur burst from the rock and muddle our brains; and there are fumes of pallid opium and green absinthe, too. Wraiths gibber. Ravens croak. Don't bother screaming - they’ll only think you’re a minor character. For we are trapped within the tales of Edgar Allan
.........
.................... COURSEWORK
It is, of course, a good idea to read lots of Poe now, in early December. Don’t simply stagger along one evening ahead of our Wednesday morning class..........And do at once brood over the official rubrics on your two-part coursework (pages 7 and 8).
.........Bear in the mind the various deadlines, marked below in the class schedule in blood-colour: any defaulters will be thrust into the pit, tortured with pendulums and imps, and finally bricked up alive in a wine-cellar with a one-eyed black cat hissing on their heads.
.................... TEXT
You have the Penguin Classics selected tales. Take Poe to bed with you, if you dare, and get used to his ghoulish company..........Here's a good online collection of his short stories (here's another).
.................... RESOURCES
This compendium site has links to much of the best Poe stuff on the web.....Here is a page linking to literary criticism of Poe.
....For pictures to go with the text, here's an almost-obsessive portal. He inspires obsession, does Poe.
....For Gustave Doré's famous engravings of Poe's 'Raven', see part 5.
....These people came to Ljubljana in the autumn.
....................CLASS SCHEDULE
7 December.....An invitation to Poe.
What is Gothic? What is the macabre? What is horror literature?
homework:..... Meditate on Poe’s death in 1849.
.....Read ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’.
.....Here are images of the Spanish Inquisition, many by the great Goya, whose atmosphere in not unlike Poe's: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16.
.....A recent film about Goya and the Inquisition, Goya’s Ghosts (2006), was a stinker, but the scene of will Inquisitorial torture be of interest, if only to enthusiasts for Natalie Portman.
.....If you want film of ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ itself - which is of course not an alternative to reading it - there's a fine narrated version by Gabriele Agresta; a gruesome surreal Czech affair (1, 2; Jan Švankmajer, 1983); and a full-length, costume-drama piece of Hollywood tosh, with the pendulum appearing only in the last ten minutes (1, 2, 3, 4; directed by Roger Corman, 1961).
14 December.....‘The Pit and the Pendulum’. Is it mad to write about insane cruelty? What is the interest of mania?
....This story “does not seem to me to have permanent literary value of any kind... Analyse ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ and you find an appeal to the nerves by tawdry physical affrightments” (William Butler Yeats). Do you agree? Do you agree with Yeats that Poe is simply “vulgar”?
.........CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY
(Christmas is, of course, the ideal time for horror stories.)
holiday work:..... .....Over Christmas read at least ‘The Black Cat’ (watch, if inclined, this strange wordless television version, with Poe himself as the murderer, by Stuart Gordon, broadcast on Masters of Horror, 19 January 2007); and ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ (here's the magnificent Vincent Price, who made a speciality of Poe, I and II).
.....And listen to Poe’s great poem ‘The Raven’, which made him internationally famous overnight (and earned him exactly $9). It is the central work in the Poe canon. You can hear it read sepulchrally by Christopher Walken, fruitily by our chum Vincent Price, or evilly by (yes!) Darth Vader. Now go the RESOURCES section and look at the Doré illustrations of the poem.
.....A film by James McTeigue called The Raven is being released on 9th March, a sort of compendium of Poe horrors turned into a thriller. Great fun.
By Monday, 9th January, email me two different ideas for your Part A coursework (the comparison of passages), and two different ideas for your Part B coursework (your creative work).
11 January.....‘The Black Cat’, ‘The Cask of Amontillado’. What is the meaning of meaningless revenge?
homework:.....read ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’; admire this magnificent monologue by, of course, Vincent Price, and ask yourself whether Price's half-horrific, half-jokey manner is the right way to read Poe.
.....(By the way, meditate on this sentence from ‘The Black Cat’: To those who have cherished an affection for a faithful and sagacious dog, I need hardly be at the trouble of explaining the nature or the intensity of the gratification thus derivable. Sometimes Poe is simply a bad writer!)
18 January.....‘The Fall of the House of Usher’: what is it, really, that goes bump in the night?
homework:.....read ‘The Imp of the Perverse’. What a great title. If you want, let Uncle Vincent read it to you; but do have the book open before you. Here's the trailer to a 2000 film.
.....Here’s something from a greater artist than Poe of the interior abyss, slight as a suburban storm drain, leading straight down to hell: Leonard Cohen’s ‘Darkness’, from Old Ideas (2012):
25 January.....Was the imp of the perverse Poe’s muse? Did he simply imagine what shouldn’t be thought of, in order to write what shouldn't be written?
.....And what do we think of ‘The Imp of the Perverse’ the story - if we can call it a story; it is mainly theorising, with a thin anecdote tacked on. A contemporary reviewer (The Nassau Monthly, December 1845) said it was “humbug”: the central idea of self-torment is chased “from the wilderness of phrenology into that of transcendentalism, then into that of metaphysics generally; then through many weary pages into the open field of inductive philosophy, where he at last corners the poor thing, and then most unmercifully pokes it to death with a long stick.”
.....In ‘The Imp’ the murder is rational, the confession irrational and self-destructive; but sometimes in Poe (in ‘The Black Cat’, for instance) the crime is irrational and self-destructive in itself, being just an excuse for confession afterward, and perverse self-immolation on the gallows. One murder prompted by the imp was the notorious case of Leopold and Loeb, which inspired the play Rope, and later the Alfred Hitchcock film Rope (1948; go to 1’04’’), and also the Richard Flesicher film Compulsion.
.....Today we decide exactly what Part B of your coursework will be.
.....(Tomorrow is Poe’s 203rd birthday. Can we say Happy birthday to a man who probably wished he hadn’t been born?)
homework:.....Listen to this - not great in the way Cohen is great, but perfect if you’re working yourself up to that imp-prompted homicide: a track from Santana’s Supernatural (1999).
There's a monster living under my bed whispering in my ear.
There’s an angel with a hand on my head: she say I’ve got nothing to fear.
There’s a darkness living deeping in my soul: and it’s still got a purpose to serve.
La ilaha illa Allah.
.....Now read ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’.
.....Adaptations: a short professional film (Travis Mays, Darren Walker, 2009); an amateur thing by teenagers, charmingly bad; a C.G.I. affair, ghastly; and a feature 2010 animation (this is just the trailer). And, of course, a dramatic reading by our dear old Vincent Price: I, II.
1 February.....‘The Tell-Tale Heart’: is conscience the one true horror? There's a monster living under my bed. Thump, thump, thumpetty-thump.
Today we fix exactly the subject of Part A of your coursework.
homework:.....We don't meet for three weeks; this is the moment to get Part A done.
.....Read ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’. The French just love this story; indeed they adore all of Poe. (Here’s a sobering notion: is he so much admired by francophones simply because they - naturally - don’t notice the heavy bombast of his English prose?) Films called The Murders in the Rue Morgue made in 1932 and 1971 are worthless tosh, with little to do with the story; the 1986 movie-for-television by Jeannot Szwarc is not great art, although it is more faithful to the story. Do listen to the song by Iron Maiden (1973).
8 February.....Prešeren Day for you; sex training for us; no class. Prešeren was born nine years before Poe and died (on 8th February, obviously) nine months earlier. They were both death-obsessed provincial Romantics who pined for a lost woman, drank, wenched and lost money. So why is there not a Poe Day, eh?
15 February.....mid-term break
By Monday, 20th February, email me a detailed update on how Parts A and B of your coursework are coming.
22 February.....We consider ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’: violent tendencies of a whole species.
homework:.....Read ‘The Purloined Letter’.
29 February.....Any horrific motiveless crimes committed today will have only quarter the harrowing anniversaries of a horrific motiveless crime committed on any other day. A thought.
.....We study ‘The Purloined Letter’. Here's a charming little film, and the fragment of a black and white film.
.....The idea of the story (hiding a stolen letter in an invisibly obvious place) has itself been stolen from Auguste Dupin and given to Sherlock Holmes (I, II).
homework:.....Email me a partial draft of Part B of your coursework.
7 March.....One of the best of Poe’s stories, because it maintains restraint of a sort, is ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ (1842). Watch the charming 2007 short film by students at the University of Technology, Sydney (I, II), and glance at the camp 1964 film with, of course, Vincent Price (trailer; I, II and the climactic masque scene, VI).
homework:.....Email me a second draft of Part B of your coursework by 12 March, and have a look at the Poe criticism for next week.
14 March.....Some Poe criticism:
devices in ‘Black Cat’
David Grantz, ‘I am safe’
Martha Womack, ‘Fall of the House of Ussher’
a review of The Raven
.....One of his most scrappy stories, on one of his favourite themes: ‘The Premature Burial’ (1850). Here are a dramatic reading, a strange video, a 1962 schlock film, a video game, a school video, and a rather sophisticated short. Here's cam footage of someone who is being buried alive by snow, and here by chums as a jolly prank. Don't try either of these at home.
21 March.....
homework:.....Email me a extracts you have selected for Part A of your coursework.
.........EASTER HOLIDAY
homework:.....By Monday 9th April, email me a draft of Part A.
11 April.....
We don't forget that Poe is, in a sense, a hack: see this recent piece by Kevin Jackson; and bear in mind The Raven, released on the 27th of this month.
homework:.....
18 April.....tutorials on part A
homework:.....draft of part A complete
25 April.....consultations on part B
homework:.....
draft of part B complete
1 May.....Finished coursework with me.
2 May.....holiday
9 May.....Revisions.
15 May.....Finished coursework in the hands of the examiner in England.
E-MAIL ME
Here's one of Gustave Dore's engravings for The Raven......To contact me, click on the bird of evil message.
.....
